


Angel Whisperer

by noiproksa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Wings, Canon Compliant, Concussions, Confused Castiel, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hurt Castiel, Hurt/Comfort, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 04:03:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17134583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiproksa/pseuds/noiproksa
Summary: Taking care of a concussed angel is a lot harder than anticipated. Dean might be out of his depth, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do everything he can to make his angel feel better.





	Angel Whisperer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DarkHeartInTheSky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkHeartInTheSky/gifts).



> For darkheartinthesky who wished for “Sick/Hurt!Castiel with Caretaker!Dean”

It was well past midnight and Dean was lying on his bed, watching TV when he heard a loud crash just outside his room. In one swift move he had snatched his gun from his bedside table and was on his way to check out what was going on.

Swinging the door open, he found Cas half-sitting, half-lying on the floor, his head leaning against the wall at an awkward angle, looking up at him dopily.

“Cas?” Dean put the safety back on and his gun away before he rushed to Cas’ side, kneeling down next to him and putting a hand on his shoulder in order to determine whether his friend was truly injured.

“I attempted to fly,” Cas explained, writhing around a bit under Dean’s touch, trying to find a more comfortable position. “I thought my wings had healed enough by now,” he continued. Then he added as an afterthought, “The attempt did not go over well.”

“You don’t say,” Dean said and just barely held back from scolding Cas about trying something stupid like that. Instead he settled for a joke to lighten up the mood, “Seems like my guardian angel is in need of a guardian angel, huh?”

“You have a guardian angel?” Cas asked, his voice somewhere between curiosity and… something else Dean couldn’t quite place.

Dean rolled his eyes. Cas could be really thick sometimes. “Well, I do have an angel who watches over me and who heals me when I injure myself and is there for me whenever I need him, so… yeah, I guess I have a guardian angel.” He smiled at Cas, squeezing his shoulder in a way that was meant to convey how much he appreciated all of that.

But Cas didn’t smile back. Instead, he furrowed his brows and squinted at him through narrowed eyes. “Why have I never seen this angel here before?—Is it Eremiel? Because you should be careful with him. He does not care for humans very much.”

That was officially too dense, even for Cas and his nonunderstanding of human expressions. Taking a closer look at the angel, Dean realized that his dazed expression was all too familiar.

“Cas? Are you concussed?”

Cas shook his head, but then he stopped and closed his eyes in pain for a moment. When he opened them again, he said, “Don’t be absurd. Angels do not get concussions.” With that declaration, he stumbled to his feet, dislodging Dean’s hand in the process and refusing his help getting up.

“You sure about that?” Dean asked as he stood up with him. “Track this.” He held a finger in front of Cas’ eyes and moved it from left to right and back.

Cas groaned and closed his eyes again, pleading, “Stop.” He had to reach out to the wall in order to support himself. Yep, that was an angelic concussion, no doubt about it.

Dean barely restrained himself from saying, “I told you so.” Instead he chose the high road and ordered in a soft tone of voice, “Come on, just heal yourself.”

Cas’ face was falling into a concentrated frown, but his eyes did not start to glow blue to indicate that a healing process had started.

“Well?” Dean asked after a moment of silence during which Cas was just staring straight ahead into the air. “Did it work?”

Cas’ eyes found his again and he tilted his head at him. “Did what work?”

“Did you heal yourself?” Dean clarified, starting to get a bit impatient.

That seemed to confuse Cas even further. “Why would I want to heal myself?”

Great. Talking to a concussed angel was even worse than talking to a concussed Sammy. Before Dean could finish counting to ten in order to keep himself from snapping at the angel, Cas spoke up again.

“My head hurts.” And then, as if he had just had a brilliant thought, “Maybe I should heal myself.”

 _8… 9… 10._ “Good idea.”

But instead of the expected blue glow, Cas was turning paler still and moaning in pain. “Maybe not as good an idea as previously thought,” he stated.

Dean reached out to Cas, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Okay, c’mon. Let’s get you more comfortable. I’m an expert at concussions. Me ‘n Sammy had enough growing up.”

“Angels do not get concussed,” Cas informed him.

Dean heaved a silent sigh. This was going to be a long night. Then he wrapped his arms around Cas’ side in order to support him. “Yeah, well—maybe fallen angels do.”

Since they were already right in front of Dean’s room, Dean helped Cas stumble the few feet inside and helped him lie down on his bed. Even these few steps were hard enough because Cas kept trying to heal himself and Dean had to remind him that it didn’t work. Every time Cas realized anew that trying to heal himself only made his head hurt worse, they had to stop and Cas had to lean against Dean, panting and groaning in pain, before they could attempt another few steps.

“Maybe I should…”

“No! Don’t heal yourself!” Dean ordered harshly for what felt like the hundredth time. “Just… lie there and don’t do anything. And _don’t_ heal yourself, got it? I just need to get a few things. Be right back.”

First on his list were ice cubes, but unfortunately he had to go to the kitchen for that. Since he didn’t feel good about leaving Cas alone, he sprinted all the way to the kitchen and back. It turned out that they didn’t have any ice, but thanks to Sammy and his strange eating habits, Dean could wrap a pack of frozen peas into a towel instead.

When he came back, Cas had somehow managed to fall out of bed. “What are you doing on the floor?” Dean asked as he laid the towel-wrapped pack of peas on the nightstand in order to heave Cas back onto the bed.

“You were gone,” Cas replied. And after a short pause he added, “I missed you.”

Son of a bitch. Dean could not deal with this right now. Cas, who barely filtered what he said on his best days, all open and… adorable for lack of a better word. Way to make him feel guilty about having left him alone to _try and help him_. Cas, of course, didn’t seem to care about what his words were doing to Dean, as he just continued his explanation.

“When I got up to look for you, the room started to move on its own.—I assume a trickster was behind that. Or maybe a witch. Do you think there is a witch somewhere in this bunker?” Cas was looking around as if he expected a witch to pop up out of nowhere.

“No. A concussion will do that to you,” Dean explained as he put the towel with the frozen vegetables on Cas’ head and made him hold it there. This time, at least, Cas didn’t object to his concussion theory.

Next, Dean went looking for the bottle of Tylenol he knew had to be somewhere in his room.

“You should not trust Eremiel,” Cas mumbled. Dean was about to ask who the hell ‘Eremiel’ was when Cas continued, “He is the worst guardian angel.—The absolute worst. And he cannot be trusted.”

“He isn’t my guardian angel,” Dean said distractedly, concentrating on searching for the painkillers, which were not, as it turned out, by the sink where he would have suspected them.

“Oh.—Who then?” Cas asked just as Dean said “Aha!” triumphantly when he found the bottle of Tylenol in the bedside drawer and tossed it to Cas.

Cas was looking at him with an unusually open expression that did something strange to Dean’s insides. The angel was usually so expressionless that Dean had learned to read the slightest eye-squint or twitch around his mouth. That’s why seeing everything Cas was thinking and feeling right there on his face was a bit strange to say the least.

“Cas… it’s _you_ , okay?” Dean said, his throat suddenly dry. “ _You_ are my guardian angel.”

“Oh,” Cas said. He was turning the bottle of painkillers between his fingers, squinting at it as if he was trying to read the inscription. Then, after a few seconds, he looked up again and added, “Not to brag, but you definitely made the right choice. I am a lot better than Eremiel at guarding.—And angeling.”

Dean rolled his eyes affectionately and said, “Sure you are, buddy.” As if there had been a choice. He didn’t even know this Eremiel guy. But Cas’ concussed mind probably didn’t realize that.

Of course that’s when Cas had to ruin the moment by saying, “My head feels strange. I think I should better…”

“Don’t heal yourself.”

Sitting vigil at Sam’s bedside after he had suffered a concussion had been par for the course growing up, so Dean was used to it. Still, Sam had been way easier to take care of. He had slept for the most part and all Dean had had to do was wake him up and check on him in increasing intervals.

Cas on the other hand didn’t seem inclined to stoop to something so human as to sleep. Instead, he would take the towel off his head in order to inspect it and ask a ton of questions like why Dean thought that a pack of frozen peas would make him (a mighty Angel of the Lord) feel better.

Getting Cas to take the bottle of Tylenol was another whole process and Dean ended up tricking him into it by telling him that all good guardian angels had to listen to their charges and that he just bet Eremiel would do it without asking any questions. Cas swallowed the pills so fast that Dean might have felt slightly guilty about using a piece of information against him that Cas probably wouldn’t have disclosed had he been in his right mind. Still, it got the job done, so Dean put that one in the win column.

Dean was just skimming through a magazine while sitting in a chair next to the bed, his feet on top of Cas’ bedspread covered legs, when Cas started tossing and turning, trying to reach his back. It kind of looked like a dog chasing its own tail while lying in a bed—utterly ridiculous, that is.

Dean sighed and closed the magazine, taking his legs off the bed. “What are you doing?”

Cas paused in his efforts and looked up at him, frustrated. “I think I sprained my wing on the landing,” he explained. Dean kept himself from commenting on the ‘landing’ part of the sentence, but just barely. “And the feathers are all out of order.—Could you scratch my left wing for me? I can’t quite reach it.”

“I can’t see your wings, dude, much less touch them,” Dean said, congratulating himself on his patience while dealing with the concussed angel.

“Oh. Right,” Cas said, looking disappointed. “I forgot.—Sometimes you are very human.”

“No shit. Might be because I _am_ human.”

Cas ignored him and instead resumed his activity of turning around to one side, then to the other, which couldn’t possibly be good for his concussion. That’s why, once Cas’ back was to him, Dean put a hand on his back to keep him from turning further. Cas immediately leaned into the touch and moved around as if to use Dean’s hand as a scratching post.

“A bit to the left,” he instructed and Dean, baffled, obeyed without hesitation, moving his hand to Cas’ left shoulder blade, which got him a content sigh from Cas. Wait—that’s where his wings might be if they were corporeal. Did he actually feel that?

Dean found himself absent-mindedly petting Cas, and the angel finally stopped fidgeting around.

Just as Dean was getting hopeful that he might actually fall asleep and thus make his job easier for him, Cas turned around to him again.

He looked at Dean earnestly for a moment and then said, “Don’t worry, Dean. I will watch over you.”

The statement was utterly ridiculous, of course, since if anything, it was Dean who was watching over Cas at the moment. But telling Cas that seemed a bit cruel, so Dean nodded instead. “Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it.”

Suddenly, Cas groaned and lifted his hands to his temples. Apparently, the painkillers had not taken care of the headache.

“Dean,” Cas whined. “Make the voices stop.”

“Angel radio?” Dean asked.

“No,” Cas said. When he didn’t add anything, Dean had to raise his eyebrows at him to get him to explain further. “Prayers.—Usually, I only hear prayers directed at me. But right now it is rather difficult to filter out prayers directed at other angels.”

“Ah.” Okay, this was definitely not a problem he’d had to deal with when Sammy had been concussed.

“You have had concussions before,” Cas realized. “Did that happen to you, too?”

“Uhm... no. I’m going to play the human card here again,” Dean said, which made Cas look at his hands in confusion, probably looking for a card. That’s why Dean clarified, “Humans don’t hear prayers, remember?”

“Oh. I see,” Cas mumbled. Then he squinted at him curiously. “Is that strange for you?”

“Not hearing prayers? Not really.” Dean shrugged his shoulders. When Cas was only looking at him more confused than ever, he added, “Is it strange for you hearing them?”

“Not really,” Cas repeated Dean’s words. “Only if there are too many all at once. Right now they are too loud. Would you mind making them stop?”

“How do you suggest I do that?” Dean asked. “Call up the people praying to you and ask them nicely to stop their prayers?”

“That would be nice, thank you,” Cas replied. “Oh, and don’t forget all the other people praying to other angels. I seem to be unable to filter out other prayers at the moment.”

Dean was tempted to just wait a couple of minutes for Cas to forget about his ridiculous request, but then he had an idea of how to make the migraine go away.

“Here’s what helped Sammy,” he said, not quite sure of how to go about it.

“Sam heard too many prayers, too?” Cas asked. That’s when Dean realized that it was high time to stop talking and let actions follow. So he just went for it and started carding his fingers through Cas’ hair.

Cas seemed to enjoy the scalp massage, letting his eyes flutter closed. Dean was savoring the peace and quiet for a moment, finding the experience quite relaxing himself, but after a few minutes Cas complained, “The voices are still there, Dean.”

“Okay,” Dean said, pausing in his ministrations and thinking about what else could help. He was quickly running out of ideas. Was there a handbook on how to take care of concussed angels? There really should be, but he didn’t want to wake Sammy in the middle of the night to ask. “Turn around,” he suggested, as he thought back to earlier.

Cas didn’t even ask why, but just turned his back to him once more, and Dean felt a wave of affection wash over him when he realized that Cas trusted him so implicitly. When Dean started scratching his shoulder blades again, Cas let out a happy sigh and snuggled deeper into Dean’s pillow and bedspread.

“I’ll watch over you real good,” Cas mumbled into the pillow, and Dean had to bite his lip to keep from huffing out a laugh at that statement. “Better’n Eremiel.”

“Yeah, you’re doing a great job as my guardian angel,” Dean tried to reassure Cas and was glad that he didn’t even have to lie about it. Granted, right now _he_ was the one taking care of his guardian angel, touching wings that weren’t there to make sure Cas forgot about voices inside his head that were praying for who knows what. But after all, Cas had been there for him countless times, too. They could be _each other’s_ guardian angels.

And finally—at long last—Dean heard Cas’ breathing even out. Seemed like he had found a way to take care of a concussed angel, after all. Perhaps _he_ should write a handbook about the topic. He was a real angel whisperer. Or maybe it was just a Cas whisperer. In any case, he kept lightly stroking Cas’ back even after he had fallen asleep—just to make sure his angel was okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Feed my muse by clicking the kudos button or - if you really want to make my day - by writing a comment (long or short, even if I posted the fic years ago, it will make me squee so hard).
> 
>  
> 
> **People who kudosed this fanfiction also kudosed:  
> **
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>   ☆ **[Of Cuddle Circles& Vessel Temperature](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16036709)** (2.1k, _Dean and Sam explain the concept of sharing body heat to an intrigued Cas._ )
> 
>   ☆ **[Touch Deprived](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16306436/chapters/38141030)** (4.1k, _Cas has to come up with excuses to be able to touch Dean and Sam. Or is it the other way around?_ )


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